We spend a lot of our time around here thinking
about advanced future technology like electric cars, spaceships, and solar
energy inventions that can take us to new places and
open up new possibilities.
And in that mindset, we can often overlook the more
simple necessities of life and how they can also be
improved by the capabilities of modern technology.
Let's talk about the air that we breathe, something that
most of us probably take for granted, but we shouldn't.
If the air is too hot, then we can't function
very well.
If the air gets too cold, then we can die.
If the air isn't clean, then we actually start to
lose mental capacity and we don't think properly.
The majority of the energy that we generate in North
America goes towards controlling the temperature of our air, either
heating it or cooling it.
So we know that if we want to reduce our
overall consumption and make our society more sustainable, then we
probably should go after the biggest contributor to our energy
problem, heating, ventilation and air conditioning, also known as HVAC.
And if you've seen the news lately, then you know
that energy has become a global concern this year.
It definitely isn't the sexiest technology out there, but it
is critically important.
And somehow, among his obsessions with electric cars and spaceships,
Elon Musk manages to spend a lot of his time
thinking about air and how Tesla can make it better
not just inside their cars, but eventually inside our homes
and buildings as well.
So let's get into the future potential of Tesla designed
HVAC systems.
So when we are talking about the future of heating
and cooling, we are mostly referring to a device called
a heat pump.
They've been around for a long time but have only
really started becoming common over the last 10 years or
so.
The prevalence of the heat pump really depends on where
you live because the advantages and disadvantages of this technology
are really going to vary according to your climate.
The best way to think of a heat pump is
like an air conditioner that can swing both ways, heating
and cooling from the same machine.
The relative heat of the air depends on the amount
of energy that it contains, or the speed at which
the molecules in the air are moving.
On a hot day, the energy from the sun transfers
into the molecules of the air and accelerates their movement.
And then those fast moving molecules impact your skin and
transfer their energy into your skin and your blood vessels,
and that makes your body hotter and then you start
to sweat.
Your body releases moisture which absorbs that heat energy and
evaporates, creating a cooling effect.
So energy in equals heat, energy out equals cool.
The cooling side of a heat pump works the same
as any regular air conditioner.
A super cold liquid refrigerant is running through a coil
of pipe that is surrounded by these conductive metal fins.
And when your fan blows hot air from the room
through this coil, the energy from the air molecules is
absorbed into the liquid of the coil.
And as long as the air coming out the other
side of that coil has a lower amount of energy
than the ambient air in your room, the air flowing
in will feel cold.
The molecules will be impacting your skin at a lower
velocity and will transfer less energy into your body.
And that is a wonderful thing.
We love air conditioning, but it uses a massive amount
of energy to do what it does because in order
to have that constant supply of super cold liquid, the
machine actually has to generate a lot of heat.
And we know that heat equals energy.
So as that refrigerant liquid absorbs energy from the air,
it obviously begins to heat up and evaporate.
The liquid that we use for this process is typically
Freon.
It boils at an extremely low temperature, below -20°C or
-4 Fahrenheit.
So even in its evaporated states, the freon is still
cold.
But it's not cold enough.
So how do we cool it down back to its
liquid state again?
Well, we actually first have to make it even hotter.
So the evaporated refrigerant hits an electric compressor, and when
you compress a gas, you concentrate the energy it contains,
you accelerate the molecules, and you create heat.
That super hot gas is then fed into another coil
on the opposite side of the machine, where another fan
blows air through it, which absorbs energy from the hot
gas and carries it outside into the environment.
The refrigerant gas is still very hot at this point.
When it exits the coil back into the system, it's
starting to condense back into a liquid, but it needs
help to get cold again.
That's where the expansion valve comes in.
O If rapidly compressing a gas makes it get much
hotter, then rapidly decompressing it will have the opposite effect.
All of that energy and activity will suddenly slow right
down.
It's like when you use a can of compressed air.
When you release the gas, it gets really cold.
Then your cold liquid out of the expansion valve goes
back into the cooling coil and the ambient air is
blown over it, which causes evaporation and then back into
the compressor.
It's a closed loop cycle, which is good because Freon
gas eats holes in our ozone layer.
We learned that the hard way.
Now in heating mode, a heat pump just works in
the opposite direction.
The heat generated by the hot compressed Freon gas is
blown into the house, and in order to evaporate the
freon, it only needs to rise above the boiling point,
which again is super cold.
So as long as the ambient temperature outside your house
is above -20°C or -4 Fahrenheit, then the heat pump
can use that air to create Freon gas, which is
then compressed to make heat.
So it's a really cool system, air conditioning and furnace
all in And we know that when we burn things,
we create carbon as a byproduct, which goes into the
atmosphere and creates an excess warming effect for the planet.
And that's bad.
And that's where we come back to Elon Musk and
Tesla.
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We know that Elon Musk is fixated on transitioning the
world to sustainable energy and maximizing efficiency.
Heat pumps do both of those things, so obviously it's
a technology that Elon is into, and it's something that
he talks about surprisingly often.
Tesla introduced their first heat pump with the release of
the Model Y in 2020.
This was a major step forward for electric cars that
was badly needed.
Your typical combustion engine vehicle doesn't have any trouble producing
heat because there is so much excess created by the
engine.
Combustion is a release of energy, Energy is heat.
But an electric car doesn't have any of that to
work with, so they need an electric heater.
The traditional approach here would be a resistive heater, where
you flow energy from the battery through a resistive metal
element.
That metal gets hot and then you flow air over
the element to absorb its energy and push it into
the cabin of the vehicle.
This system works great, but it requires a lot of
energy drawn from the battery pack, which is energy that
is not going to drive the car and that means
lower range.
The heat pump accomplishes the same thing but does it
in a much more energy efficient way.
So we remember that the heat pump uses the ambient
air temperature to evaporate the liquid refrigerant into a gas.
Even if the outside air is cold, it will still
boil the refrigerant.
So that work is being done for free by the
energy from the air outside.
Then the compressor just takes that gas and compresses it
to generate the heat which gets blown into the cabin.
So because the heat pump is getting free labor from
the energy contained in the air, it gets about three
times the efficiency rating of a resistive electric heater, and
that means it draws significantly less energy from the battery.
Of course, now that all falls apart if your ambient
temperature falls below the boiling point of your refrigerant.
That definitely does happen where I live, but that doesn't
happen where most of you live.
In most populated areas of Canada, we occasionally get temperatures
below -20 Celsius in late January and early February.
And there definitely were some reported issues with Tesla's heat
pumps failing to produce heat in those conditions.
So this is not a solution for everyone, but it
still works great for most people.
And now Elon wants to put that technology in your
house.
It's an idea that he first started talking about while
he was stoned on the Joe Rogan podcast back in
2018.
He said that there was a lot of room to
make homes more efficient with heating and cooling.
And he talked about a smart home system that could
connect with your car so that the house automatically knows
when you leave and when you're on your way back.
And they can use that information to regulate the temperature.
It won't waste energy maintaining the climate when there is
no one inside the house, but the house will always
be the perfect temperature when you arrive home.
Joe asked if he was actually developing something like that
and Elon said I cannot answer questions about potential future
products.
Then he brought the idea back to the surface in
2020 by writing on Twitter.
Sure would love to do home HVAC that's quiet and
efficient with humidity control and HEPA filter.
So now we are bringing another idea into play which
is air quality.
We know that Tesla's top tier vehicles, the Model S
and Model X, have built in HEPA air filters, jokingly
referred to as Bio Weapons Defense Mode.
But this is really just a very high quality filter
that removes at least 99.97% of all fine particle matter
and gaseous pollutants from the air, and that includes bacteria,
viruses, pollen and mold spores.
Elon says that this is 10 times better air quality
than any other car.
Wouldn't that be a great thing to have for the
air in your house?
Now, not many people really appreciate the value of clean
air, but it does go beyond just filtering out viruses
and allergies.
Even just elevated levels of CO2 from stagnant airflow can
have an effect on your body.
A stuffy room can get up to 1000 parts per
million of CO2 and that level can actually make your
brain get fuzzy and you can't think properly.
Tesla's former head of AI Andre Carpathy carries a CO2
monitor with him at all times, and Elon Musk keeps
one at his desk that alerts him anytime levels rise
above 1000.
So just something to consider.
Now we have 2 existing things that Tesla already makes
and they just need to be scaled up from vehicle
size to house size.
Of course heat pumps for houses already exist, we just
talked about that.
But Elon thinks that Tesla can do it better.
He said before that the unit Tesla created for the
Model Y is exceptional.
He wrote on Twitter a couple of years ago.
Model Y heat pump is some of the best engineering
I've seen in a while.
Team did next level work.
And he went on to explain the reason for that
writing.
PCB design techniques applied to create a heat exchanger that
is physically impossible by normal means.
Heat pump also has a local heating loop to spool
up fast and extend usable temperature range.
Octa valve is pretty special too.
Team did great work.
No credit to me.
End Quote.
And this is probably why Tesla was able to alleviate
a lot of the associated heat pump issues in super
cold weather with a software update last winter.
So when it got to that point in early February
when those of us in the frozen N hit the
coldest of the cold weather, the Tesla heat pumps that
were now being used in every new vehicle, they weren't
really cutting it.
The NHTSA even got concerned that the pumps couldn't put
out enough heat to keep the windshield defrosted.
Tesla was able to recalibrate the pump using a firmware
update that seemed to fix the problem.
So again, that sounds like a great thing to have
in your house.
High efficiency air conditioning, electric heating and air purification all
in one single unit that can get firmware updates.
It's still something that Elon is talking about even recently.
In July, he responded to someone who asked about home
HVAC with a HEPA filter to deal with allergies.
Elon wrote it's on the future product list.
Especially important in places like Austin, which has next level
amounts of pollen in the air.
So what could that look like?
Most people are envisioning a kind of smart home system
built on Tesla's existing solar power and battery storage system
with the HVAC integrated into that.
So the brain of your system would know how much
energy is generated by the solar cells on your roof,
how much is stored in your Powerwall batteries, and how
much of that is required to address heating and cooling
with your home.
And a very smart artificial intelligence, kind of like the
one that Tesla already develops for self driving and other
applications, could manage that distribution in the most efficient way
possible, especially when you incorporate your car into the smart
home ecosystem.
Now, it knows when you leave, when you're on your
way home, and it would even know how much charging
your car is going to require overnight.
So you are centralizing and maximizing the efficiency of a
lot of very complex systems in your house.
You get the best performance possible without even having to
think about it.
And that goes beyond just making life very comfortable.
Obviously that sounds like a massive luxury, but it's really
the efficiency that makes this so compelling.
If we are going to transition the majority of homes
away from natural gas and fossil fuel based heating, then
there needs to be a really compelling alternative that makes
sense from a financial perspective.
If I'm going to have my existing natural gas furnace
torn out and replaced with something new, then I'm really
going to need to see some concrete benefits to doing
that.
It's not a minor home renovation project, it's a really
big deal.
So it would be cool to hear from some people
who are already running this kind of system in your
house, especially if you've transitioned from a fuel furnace to
an electric heat pump.
Let us know in the comments below what kind of
difference that makes for your utilities and efficiency.
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